Vacation: Finger Lakes

Here we are in the fifth month of a pandemic and no end in sight. There have been occasional forays

out of our Queens apartment, but largely it's been confinement city. Normally during the summer, we try to take a trip or two. Months ago, my husband and I had talked about a trip to France and I was planning to drive to Canada and take in the Stratford and Shaw festivals, but that's clearly out now. But we did have a welcome respite with a week-long trip to the Finger Lakes region. Since we were staying within New York State and infection rates are way down here, we figured it would be okay as long as we were careful and followed safety rules. We've been there many times before, but this time, we really explored and found many interesting distractions.

We stayed at a lovely Air BnB run by friends just outside of a lakeside town called Skaneateles, a funny name used as a joke on Rocky and Bullwinkle decades ago. There were cruises around the lake on a modified schedule and with reduced capacity. In all the previous visits, we had never taken a boat trip before, so we opted for the mail boat, a three-hour cruise around the lake (the captain made the obligatory Gilligan's Island joke). Not all the lake houses are accessible by roads, so some have to have their mail delivered by boat. A crew member crawls out on the prow and leaning out hands to the letters to the homeowner or places them in a mailbox on the dock. There were only about 25 passengers and we were required to be keep our masks on if we stood up and moved about. Being on the water was so refreshing and relaxing.


Once in town, we had lunch on the lawn of the Sherwood Hotel. While biting into my huge BLT on toast, I heard a thud, and out of the corner of my eye, I espied a female jogger bouncing off the windshield of a car. She had been crossing the intersection which had no traffic light and the car was making a right turn. In this town, as in Massachusetts, cars must yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk, so perhaps the jogger was not looking as she trotted from the sidewalk. Fellow outdoor diners called an ambulance and the injured party was whisked away within 15 minutes. The victim was alert and conscious, though obviously in pain. The driver was an elderly woman who emerged from her car with the assistance of a cane to answer the police officer's questions. You could see the impact of the blow on the old woman's shattered windshield. It was a jolting contrast to the blissful boat ride of that morning.

On subsequent days we drove to nearby Auburn, Seneca Falls, and Ithaca. Auburn was largely

shuttered so we could not see the historic homes of William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, and Harriet Tubman, the former slave who liberated dozens of African-Americans via the Underground Railroad. If Biden is elected President, I pray he puts Tubman on the $20 bill as Obama had started to but Trump and Mnuchin stopped it. (Trump probably couldn't stand to see his beloved Andrew Jackson usurped by a black woman.)

Seneca Falls, the next town over had equal historic significance and fortunately, a few sites were actually open. Several pioneers in the Women's Suffrage movement resided here and, in 1848, the first Women's Rights Convention was held in a public hall, now part of a historical landmark known as Women's Rights National Park. But the building is not really a park, but a museum. The site was closed, but there was a town visitors' center with information on the convention and Seneca Falls' role in the movement.

Seneca Falls' other claim to fame is its alleged inspiration for the fictional town of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra, the film's director, had an aunt in Auburn and he reportedly visited Seneca Falls for a haircut. The town had a famous bridge from which an Italian immigrant jumped to rescue a young woman who was attempting suicide. Although no documentation exists to prove it, Capra may have been inspired by the incident to work in a similar scene in the film. George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart's character, leaps from the bridge to save Clarence the Angel. The bridge now has a plaque commemorating the possibility and the street sign leading to the bridge read "George Bailey Lane" and "Bedford Falls Blvd." Every Christmas, the town celebrates with a It's a Wonderful Life festival. I found videos on several of them on YouTube, including one with an interview with the actress who played Zuzu, the youngest Bailey child. There's even a museum dedicated to the film and the town's connection, but it was closed. If they had a Christmas ornament with a bell, I would have bought it to add to my movie-TV-themed decorations.

Ithaca was nice with plenty of book shops. On the drive over, we happened on a huge barn, stuffed floor to ceiling with books.

There was a drive-in movie theater nearby us which was showing old pictures--a double feature of Beetlejuice and Gremlins, but we opted not to bother. We did finally catch up with Knives Out on Amazon on my laptop.

The next to final day we drove around the wine country and stopped at a vineyard featuring five

Enjoying a flight of mimosas

tastings for $5. They call such a sampling a flight. You pick your five choices from a menu and they hand you a board with five holes in it for the glasses. We also got a wrapped plastic sampling of cheeses and hummus platter. Then we saw people at the next table (a family from New Jersey), sampling mimosas. They looked so good, I sampled those too. Fortunately, Jerry was the designated driver on the way home. The next day, we drove back to NYC and now we are back in Queens. It was just announced Herman Cain died of COVID after attending Trump's Tulsa rally (we don't know if he got the virus there or not, but he wasn't wearing a mask), mask-rejecter Congressman Louis Gomert has tested positive, Trump is retweeting crazy claims from a doctor who believes alien DNA and dreams of sex witches cause illnesses. And to put the icing on the cake, Trumpy just suggested delaying the election. He knows he's going to lose and he's playing for time, hoping a vaccine will be available before he gets kicked out on his ear. There were a few Trump bumper stickers and flags in the region, but there were also rainbow flags for Gay Pride month and Black Lives Matters banners. Hopefully, sanity will reign and Trump will be out.